The forms of therapy which are routinely applied in modern medicine for tumoral therapy often fail to achieve local tumor control, which is the cause of death of roughly 30% of cancer patients. It is, therefore, important to develop novel and improved techniques for local and regional tumor treatment.
In today's medical care, radiation therapy, also known as radiation treatment, surgery and combinations hereof are the most commonly employed methods for treating malignant tumors. Roughly every second patient suffering from infiltrating cancer is treated by radiation therapy, but only roughly half of these patients are cured. Such failure depends, on the one hand, on the presence of a wider spread disease (distant metastasis) or recurrence (a regrowth of a tumor in the treatment region), and, on the other hand, because certain tumor forms are resistant to radiation.
Attempts have been made, with varying success, to reinforce and improve the efficiency of radiation therapy in sterilizing tumors. For example, use has been made of more sophisticated radiation therapy techniques, such as stereotactic treatment, "conformal radiotherapy" of changed fractioning or added medication to increase the radiation sensitivity in the tumors.
Use is also made of heat as adjuvant to ionizing radiation which, for certain tumor forms, may increase the number of complete remissions by up to a factor of two.
It is obvious that there are both desires and needs in the art for a more efficient technique for treating tumors.